"This actually began as just a tweak and the original Float32 code mostly changed the bump mapping precision by using 32bit Floating point operations instead of 16 and did a great job breaking parallax mapping," Sneed told Opposable Thumbs. "Soon after, it turned into a full code rewrite, namely, the way lighting is processed by the GPU. The original shader code used Blinn half-angle vector and I found this to give everything a plastic look instead of placing specular highlights where they would realistically be located. Thus my goal was to change this."

He's done a great job; using his changes, the game offers some much-improved lighting effects, and enthusiasts will be pleased to see all this comes at very little cost in terms of performance. Impressive.

"When it was all said and done, all dynamic lights including the sun, hemicube and point/spot lights indoor and out were converted to use the phong reflection vector," said Sneed. "This offers a very realistic representation of how light reflects from a surface. This also provides a much more realistic diffuse lighting due to specular lights being confined to where they should be, and brings out the specular highlighting on shiny objects in a whole new way." I'm not sure what this means, but Sneed is able to sum it up nicely for the non-techy people in the audience. "Overall, the game should feel warmer and much more real, as if you were standing there watching the sunset in real life." Okay, that makes sense.

I'm glowing with pride that this project came out of our own community, and want to commend Mr. Sneed on his efforts at improving S.T.A.L.K.E.R. This is the sort of thing that makes PC gaming such fun to follow.